6th October 2006 Archive

You may or may not know that Earth's magnetosphere leaks. You might think it is therefore time to send for the intergalactic plumbers. And in a manner of speaking, that is what the European Space Agency has done, in collaboration with its counterparts in China.

Let's start with the bloggers. Such an easy target - there are so many that any mud slung is bound to stick to some of them. Still, as Ashley Norris points out, Daily Mail columnists really should be careful about any kind of projectiles they launch, lest they turn out to be boomerangs:

Nokia has announced it will be working with Orange to customise Symbian S60 handsets, allowing Orange to remotely manage and update interfaces to highlight new services as well as provide an individually customised user experience.

Hitachi has asked for 16,000 Sony-made laptop batteries which may pose a fire risk to be returned for a free replacement, the Japanese computer company said today, the second notebook maker to launch such a recall this week.

Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) are the subject de jour with IT vendors, who have been using the term as if the concept has been totally understood by the buying audience and is well along the way to general implementation.

Two studies which demonstrated that rectal massage was a cure for "intractable hiccups" last night secured the prestigious Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine at the annual Annals of Improbable Research awards ceremony.

The next generation of ATI's South Bridge core logic technology will support Flash memory as a fast-loading, power-conserving hard drive data cache, if allegedly leaked company roadmap slides are to be believed.

The MiniDAB is slighly smaller than early iPods, and while it's very much lighter than the Apple device - it feels like it's missing the battery, even though it isn't - it has none of the iPods looks. Apart from the iPod-like black and white colour schemes, the MiniDAB has a rather 1990s look about it: simplicity is out, complexity is in - presumably to imply a large feature set.

President Bush has approved legislation that will make amateur radio hams part of the emergency communications network in the US. The provision was tucked away in a section of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) 2007 Appropriations Act (HR 5441), which was signed into law on Wednesday following earlier Congressional approval.

ATI's ageing AMD-oriented RD580 discrete chipset will soon be upgraded to support three graphics cards and two CPUs, it has been claimed. The part will join the upcoming RS690 to lead ATI's sales drive during H1 2007.

Rolls-Royce has suspended production of its Trent 900 engine for a year in the wake of this week's announcement by Airbus parent company EADS that the A380 "Superjumbo" delivery schedule had been put back for a third time.

European Union and US negotiators have struck a new deal on sharing airline passenger data, resolving concerns that failure to reach an accord before a 1 October legal deadline might affect trans-Atlantic air travel.

Colonel Riley spent most of that week pretending to be a baby blue whale. His friends did not seem to mind, and neither did the real whales. As a whale, Riley was cheerful, agile and smooth. Things only turned ugly when he tried to swallow 20,000 gallons of brine in a single gulp with the help of a device of his own design. Everyone thought Riley's brine rocket ingenious. But we recoiled at the motivation lurking behind the machine - Julio Stantore, Butterflies are Always Welcome

Google is close to buying YouTube for $1.6bn, according to reports. Props for the scoop, if the talks pan out, go to TechCrunch, the Red Herring of the Web 2.0 Generation, which today reported this "completely Unsubstantiated Google/YouTube Rumor". The WSJ today also says that Google and YouTube are negotiating and mention $1.6bn as the price. But this could merely mean that the two publications have the same source.

Alcatel reckons it's time that 10Gig Ethernet reached the wiring closet, and has extended its Omniswitch 9000 series with a low-end five-slot chassis able to support up to 24 10Gig ports, 96 1Gig ports, or a combination thereof.

Bad brews and wasted beer could be a thing of the past, according to Rockwell Automation, which claims that its packaged Brewhouse Solution covers 80 per cent of a brewery's production management needs.

New developments in online selling and the lawPublishers and authors are taking Google to court over its programme to digitise the libraries of four US universities, Oxford university library and the New York Public Library.

T-Mobile USA, America's smallest cellco, is to splashing $2.7bn on a 3G network build-out. Until last month, the German-owned firm was constrained by a severe shortage of wireless spectrum - meaning crap reception in many areas and more network busy signals than its rivals.

Microsoft today made available a new test build for Windows Vista, the mythical desktop operating system of legend. It's called RC2, or Release Candidate 2 (build number 5744), and it really is only for diehard Vista testaholics. And the stupid.